


Coccoli

by cognomen



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Food, M/M, you might get hungry because I got so hungry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 20:16:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4193472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Will Graham cannot help but to be aware of the culture and history of the city around him. He can sense the age of the streets and bricks, the history that passed through and between them- longer in this city than any American city has existed. Time has whetted it, war and natural phenomenon have honed it and at the core it is old and strong. It seems to be of one mind, one color, one vision. Tan and red and close around Will - the streets are very narrow, still built for carriages and the buildings are crouched against the sides so that they cannot grow any wider.</i><br/> <br/>-</p><p>A prompt for ' Pazzi and Will taking a walk at the center of Firenze and Pazzi wanting Will to try some coccoli ', which turned into something way more involved than it probably should have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coccoli

Will Graham cannot help but to be aware of the culture and history of the city around him. He can sense the age of the streets and bricks, the history that passed through and between them- longer in this city than any American city has existed. Time has whetted it, war and natural phenomenon have honed it and at the core it is old and strong. It seems to be of one mind, one color, one vision. Tan and red and close around Will - the streets are very narrow, still built for carriages and the buildings are crouched against the sides so that they cannot grow any wider.

Instead, the pace here was leisurely for a city. People walked or biked their groceries home, some on motorized scooters. There was none of the rush of Baltimore, with it's wide, multilane roads. No cabs or busses in a hurry, tours and tourists pouring bustling out of the subways and into the streets in a desperate rush to do and see as much as they can before they have expended their small weeks of vacation and must return.

Here, Will is the tourist, but he feels no urgency. The timelessness is infectious without losing wonder. It invites him in from the depths of his detachment, warm spring and gentle breeze funneled against him through the streets. Sun on the back of Will's neck as he follows the sure footsteps of his guide.

Pazzi, Will thinks, wants to belong here. He is anxious to prove his part is more than just to exist within the city's forgiveness for those long ago crimes of an ancestor whose blood had somehow stayed here, but he is one step out of synch with Florence and he senses it keenly, aware.

He is not the tans and reds of Florence, Will thinks, but the businesslike grays of ambition in a very American mode - Pazzi rushes, though less so here amongst these familiar soporific streets. He perceives himself - through the collective awareness of the city for the sins of some 500 years past - as a step behind when he isn't. Pazzi is ahead, anxious to catch up when Florence will never forget its centuries. 

Strike the records, hold the crimes beneath your tongue; like communion.

He would, Will thinks, fit well in America where it was customary to shake off far more recent pasts and try to forget about them; where those around were as eager to do the same. _You scratch my back..._

"What are you thinking about?" Pazzi asks, his tone one made for whispered conspiracy. No wonder Florence had struck the crest with leaping fish. Will is used to it, in the weeks they have passed together, but it still touches a wire against the bottom of his spine, a cheap electric thrill at the memory of such conspiratorial Italian just behind his ear or pressed into the skin of his belly, over and around the insensate plain of scar tissue. An answering upturned jag to the smile pressed over it.

"Back scratches," Will answers, acidically difficult. Pazzi has yet to protest Will's taciturn answers. He does not comment on the battery-discharge flavor of Will's words. 

"I was thinking," Pazzi says, frustratingly calm, "that it is nearly ten a.m. and you have not eaten since our arrival."

They had come by late train - an express as people in Europe still found viable - the evening before and retired to Pazzi's apartment, which was nicely located but small. Good for two to live in comfort.

It was now nearly empty, a reminder of success turned very quickly to failure, a rug pulled out from under the feet. That Pazzi remained standing where the rug had been was stubbornness more than pride. 

Will didn't like to think that the place felt as utilitarian and anxiously familiar as his own farm house; adrift in the center of the city as Will's home was in its sea of grass.

The city feels nothing like Wolf Trap, however.

"It's hard to appreciate food the same way after you've eaten at the monster's table," Will says, when he realizes Pazzi's comment is inviting input. Florence is a city of bistros and cafes, and the enticing rich smell of expresso is one of the few scents that has not re-associated itself with Hannibal. "Food loses it's savor when your realize your host is looking at you with eyes for the next course."

"It's unlikely we would find Hannibal Lecter working behind the counter at a Tuscan cafe," Pazzi says, without any judgment. Will wonders if he had ever dined at Dr. Lecter's table - and then supposes not. Perhaps, twenty years ago, Hannibal had kept his dinners to himself. "There is a place just along the Arno... have you ever had coccoli?"

Will has to admit he hasn't.

Pazzi leads him to a crowd funneled along into the traffic crossing the Ponte Vecchio - the last standing bridge where the Medici, those ancestral enemies of the Pazzi, had crossed on foot, elevated over the common rabble. There are shops appended to the sides of the bridge, hanging precariously out over the water. At the statue of Cellini - a bearded and solemn bust - the fence surrounding it to ward off climbing children and touching hands is a mass of padlocks, hung from every bar. 

"What are these?" Will asks, pausing - he curls his fingers beneath one of the modern gold colored locks - it is inscribed with two sets of initials and stuck tight.

"Lover's locks," Pazzi says. "There was a novel, _Ho Vogila De Te_ , and now lovers will put these on bridges. They throw the keys into the river and it is supposed to seal their love."

Will lets the lock fall, surprised by the sheer number of locks affixed - he can see them along every metal loop exposed on the bridge. 

"There is a fine," Pazzi continues, his tone curling around the word as if it were laughable in the face of such obvious disregard. "Yet they have to come and cut thousands of locks off every year."

"I wonder if it works," Will says. 

"I wonder how many locks belonging to dead lovers they will cut if Il Mostro goes back to his ways," Pazzi says. "Soon the lover's lanes will have more policemen than couples."

"His pattern - if you can call it that - has changed. He no longer paints Botticelli," Will says. "He creates his own compositions now, commendatore; he is no longer a student of art but reaching for his own mastery."

"I should be grateful," Pazzi answers. "The Bargello once was adorned with a painting of the conspirators by Botticelli - Alexander the sixth had it stricken from the walls."

Here, he pauses to let the thought form in Will's mind, leading them to a table - outside, at a cafe where the wide umbrellas shield the patrons from too much sun and they can see the river. When they are seated, he gives voice to Will's thoughts in a way Will finds as unnerving as others must when he had done the same for killers.

"It would be an irony of the sort _he_ would very much enjoy..." Pazzi starts, and though his accent and voice are wrong, Will Graham hears the words in the sound of his own, "to recreate a lost piece."

"He'll find a way to paint you into those illustrious shoes," Will warns, "but you seem fascinated with being killed by him."

"He made me keenly aware that mortality runs in my family," Pazzi answers.

The silence of the art gallery grows between them - appreciative quiet of the sort required to digest how you will relate to something outside of yourself. The waiter comes, and Pazzi orders for them in Italian - will can follow enough to know that the promised coccoli is coming, and a pair of coffees. Not expresso, but the rich Italian variety of brewed coffee. It will taste like earth and be consumed black.

Will is acquiring a taste.

He doesn't consider for very long how it must look to have Pazzi order for him. Perhaps as bad as following Hannibal across the ocean to feast his mind on a trail of bodies; bread crumbs through the dark forest.

Then the food comes - arranged beautifully on a white plate but without the fluttery showmanship of extra bones or tentacles or flowers- just bright pink and clean white; meat and soft cheese and golden brown rounds of bread a little better than walnut sized. Will doesn't think it seems like very much food for two.

Pazzi takes the first demonstratively, splitting the steaming fried dough open between his fingers with no reserve for delicacy, claiming a spoonful of the soft cheese to spread in the still-hot middle. It runs lewdly into the hot interior and then Pazzi wraps the entire thing in a thin leaf of prosciutto. Thus combined, it vanishes in two well-savored bites. Will reaches out to follow the example.

The puffs of dough are warm and crisp - not sweet but yeasty and a little salty, the cheese tangy, the prosciutto a butter-slick taste on his tongue. Smooth and not uncomplicated. Balanced. Will enjoys it in spite of himself, experiencing something that Hannibal had never touched. Strange, if he had been in Florence as a young man. Perhaps he avoided the local recipes as an attempt to hide his history - but more likely, there was something tied here in Florence. 

Something he was drawn to and repelled from. An orbital motion. 

Will eats three of the devices, and finds that even considering a fourth evokes a feeling like the threat of a popping button. He is full, however, and satisfied with the faint tang of meat still on the tip of his tongue and just the barest amount of salt beneath. He pulls a soft runnel of cheese from the side of his thumb with his mouth and sits back, occasionally lifting his cup and thinking of the city around them. It has a slow, heavy pulse. It isn't the racing of the act of love, but the measured, thudding sensation of the aftermath.

His impression of Italy is that the territory of it stretches over all of the topography of love - most would say Paris, some would claim less regional and standard European versions. To Will, he sees the map and the territory both, like the predictions of marks left on his own skin, and guesses that Hannibal will romance him geographically.

Pazzi looks up, wiping his hands on a napkin, watching Will. He can see the question formed and discarded in Pazzi's thoughts - _what are you thinking?_. It is, unfortunately, not about the excellent food or the patient company or the sedate and beautiful city.

Will has dined at the monster's table and all else is just a momentary distraction until he supped again.

[End.]

**Author's Note:**

> -Lover's Locks are really a thing in europe and they're messing up bridges and ancient architecture. Don't do this thing.  
> \- Here is a recipe for Coccoli: http://thebittersweetgourmet.com/coccoli-fritti-with-prosciutto-stracchino/  
> -Please feel free to make some and try it, it's easy to make. If you can't find Straccino cheese in your town (as I couldn't), a good sit-in is Marscapone (which I found at wal-mart, so it should be decently universal to get).  
> -Tiramisu is the best breakfast.  
> -If you enjoyed this work and read it relatively soon after publication, I would appreciate an @gyldensterne on Twitter, make sure to tag #savehannibal and help our show. Thank you!


End file.
